If you decide to use the above script, test it very carefully. There may be one or two typos or logic errors. If you have administrator rights on the server, the script can be executed remotely (it does not need to be run directly on the server). WMI queries are given a very low priority, so if the CPU run queue is long, the script may appear to hang for a long time. To run the script, open a command line window and type:

After I wrote the above script and this and the previous blog articles I stumbled upon the following very recent news article that states the following:
dba-oracle.com/t_display_background_processes_windows.htm

“In Windows, the ‘thread’ model is used, and Oracle dispatches his own background tasks within the domain of the single process, oracle.exe. Hence, you cannot see any background processes from the Windows OS (but you can see listener process and parallel query slaves).”

OK, forget about my script, because the quote directly above states that it is not possible. Someone please call Oracle Corp. and tell them that their Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows needs to be removed from the documentation because what it shows is simply not possible. Did I mention that I dislike being confused?

Hints for Posting Code Sections in Comments

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When the spacing of text in a comment section is important for readability (execution plans, PL/SQL blocks, SQL, SQL*Plus output, etc.) please use a <pre> tag before the code section and a </pre> tag after the code section:
<pre>

SQL> SELECT
2 SYSDATE TODAY
3 FROM
4 DUAL;
TODAY
---------
01-MAR-12

</pre>
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When posting test case samples, it is much easier for people to reproduce the test case when the SQL*Plus line prefixes are not included - if possible, please remove those line prefixes. This:

SELECT
SYSDATE TODAY
FROM
DUAL;

Is easier to execute in a test case script than this:

SQL> SELECT
2 SYSDATE TODAY
3 FROM
4 DUAL;

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Greater than and Less than signs in code sections are often interpretted as HTML formatting commands. Please replace these characters in the code sections with the HTML equivalents for these characters: